Daily Bulletin

Wednesday, January 24, 2001

Ignatieff gives Hagey Lecture tonight

Checking cold air for the 2,000th time

Loan default figures drop again

What to mark on your calendar

The year of the snake
begins today, as the calendar rolls around to year 4699 in the Chinese
calendar.
New year celebrations extend for fifteen days, until the Lantern
Festival, and there will be parties both private and public. The cafeterias
in both Village I and Ron Eydt Village will be serving a New Year's
dinner today. And at Bon Appetit in the Davis Centre, the feature is a
Vietnam-style meal for the holiday, called "Tet" in Vietnamese.
Neither place, I trust, will be offering
strawberry
short-snake as a holiday delicacy.

Ignatieff gives Hagey Lecture tonight

The history of human rights will be the topic of this
year's Hagey Lecture, to be given at 8:00 tonight in the Humanities Theatre.

Author and historian Michael Ignatieff (left) will present the
free lecture under the title "Human
Rights and the Rights of States: Are They on
a Collision Course?" The talk will be based on his recent research on the
history of human rights.

The Hagey Lecture, co-sponsored by UW and the faculty association,
was launched in 1970 to honour Gerry Hagey, the university's first
president. Hagey lecturers have distinguished themselves in some scholarly
or creative field and their work cuts across traditional disciplines and
national boundaries.

Recently,
Ignatieff has been serving on two independent international
commissions: one on Kosovo (1999-2000), the other on Sovereignty and
Intervention (2000-2001).
Currently, he is spending a year at Harvard University in the Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government.

Ignatieff is the author of nine books, which began with A Just
Measure of Pain (1978) and include discussions of war, nationalism
and other issues, as well as Isaiah
Berlin; a Life (1997). His most recent product is The
Rights Revolution, based on last year's
Massey Lectures for the CBC.

He has also written extensively for books and magazines, and over the past
15 years, he has been a documentary film writer and host for BBC
Television.
Among his numerous works for television was the highly acclaimed series
"Blood and Belonging" (1993, six 50-minute episodes) for the BBC, CBC and
PBS affiliates, which dealt with ethnic nationalism in Yugoslavia, Turkey,
Québec, Northern Ireland, Germany and Ukraine.
More recently, he produced the series "Future War" (March 2000, three
50-minute episodes) for the BBC and CTV.

Toronto-born Ignatieff's writing and academic careers have been quite
intertwined. He was a reporter for the Globe and Mail in 1964-65
while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto.
As the holder of a Canada Council Fellowship, he completed doctoral
studies in history at Harvard in 1975. He was an assistant professor in
history at the University of British Columbia from 1976 to 1978. He then spent
six years as a senior research fellow at King's College, Cambridge
University, before becoming a documentary film writer, television
host, and editorial columnist. His credentials range from a Governor-General's
Award for non-fiction to a MacArthur Foundation grant.

Checking cold air for the 2,000th time

The UW-based
Residential Energy
Efficiency Project will
be evaluating its 2,000th home today, as it moves toward winding up this
phase of the project in April.
And guess whose house it will be?

Answer: Brad Blain, development officer in UW's faculty of environmental
studies, who lives in the village of Conestogo just east of Waterloo.

Media have been invited to watch this evaluation, take photos of the "blower
door home air leakage test", and interview the students working on the project,
the home energy advisors -- and Blain. It all helps bring
more publicity to a project that has helped local residents
save many thousands of dollars in heating costs since it was launched
two years ago.

REEP conducts comprehensive home energy evaluations to help households
reduce their energy costs, which are zooming this winter.
A typical household in southwestern Ontario will pay $1,150 this year for
gas heating compared with $885 last year.

Researchers say that based on REEP
data, the average home in Waterloo Region could reduce its fuel consumption
by 20 per cent.
REEP is a community project that has been supported by the federal
government's Climate Change Action Fund. Local partners include Cambridge &
North Dumfries Hydro, Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro, Waterloo North Hydro,
Kitchener Utilities, and the Elora Centre for Environmental Excellence.

"UW employees have been a major source of participants for this
research project," says Ryan Kennedy, an intern with the project. He said
publicity is being sent to some 40,000 homeowners in the Cambridge area
on February 1, "and that will likely fill up our capacity until the
end," but he'd like to give one more chance for UW people to sign up,
regardless of where they live.

Loan default figures drop again

The number of students who don't pay back their Ontario Student
Loans keeps dropping, the government has announced -- and UW's rate
is the lowest of all.

The percentage of students who defaulted on their
Ontario Student Assistance
Program (OSAP) loans is now the lowest it has been since the Government
began publicly releasing default rates in 1997, Training, Colleges and
Universities Minister Dianne Cunningham announced today.

"By releasing
these
data, we have brought increased accountability to the
system by allowing students and their parents to better plan for the cost
of their postsecondary education," said Cunningham. "I am pleased to
see that rates are falling and more students are paying back their loans,
but we still have a way to go to meet our overall commitment to reduce
OSAP default rates."

This year's default rate is 15.7 per cent, down from 18.2 per cent in
1999. This is the third consecutive annual
drop in loan default rates for the province since 1997, when the
overall rate was 23.5 per cent.

The decline in rates demonstrates significant progress in meeting the
Government's goal, set in 1998, to
reduce overall OSAP default rates to less than 10 per cent by 2003.

In fact the default rate for university students is already below 10 per
cent, falling this year to 7.1 per cent from last year's 8.4 per cent.
The rates in 2000 were 17.2 per cent for community colleges, 28.9 per cent
for private vocational schools, and 6.4 per cent for a small number
of students at "other" institutions such as Bible colleges and the
Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College.

The government measures the number of students who have defaulted on loan
payments three years after their last OSAP loan -- for 2000, those who
had loans in 1997-98.

UW's default rate in 2000 was 3.5 per cent, down from a 4.9 per cent
rate the previous year. That represents 67 loans in default from the
1,938 students who last borrowed OSAP money three years ago.

Most other universities are also showing a drop from their 1999 default
rates. Wilfrid Laurier University's rate fell from 5.7 per cent last
year to 5.2 per cent this year, and Toronto's from 6.9 per cent to 5.1
per cent.

What to mark on your calendar

UW's permanent art collection will receive a
fresh interpretation in the display that opens today
in the Modern Languages building gallery.
"The exhibition," says curator Carol Podedworny, "will feature
contemporary Canadian works in various media drawn from the considerable
collections of UW and maintained by the UW
Art Gallery." What makes the show unique is the perspective
provided by its curators: the students of Fine Arts 330. As part of the
course, which Podedworny is teaching, the students have selected works
for the show, researched and written didactic
labels for the art, and installed the exhibition. The show
will run through April 4.

A blood donor clinic continues, 10:00 to 4:00, in the Student
Life Centre (also tomorrow and
Friday). Outside clinic hours, it's possible to make advance
appointments by arrangement at the turnkey desk.

The
New Berlin Chamber Ensemble will
play a noontime concert today in the
Conrad Grebel College chapel, starting at 12:30. On the program: works by
Dave Brubeck, Georges Bizet, Kurt Weill, Kirk MacDonald, Billy
Strayhorn -- I even notice several of the wonderful "Pictures at an
Exhibition" by Modest Moussorgsky. Admission is free.

The InfraNet Project
"Smart Community Seminar Series" today presents Ian Kyer of the law firm
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, speaking on
"Adapting the Law for E-Commerce". About the seminar:

Technology regularly races ahead of the law, which is forced to adopt new
laws or adapt old ones to deal with the problems that the technology
creates. This is certainly true as the business world goes online. As
business is increasingly being done in cyberspace, lawyers are asking:
whose laws govern? are online contracts enforceable? do electronic
signatures satisfy legal requirements? do trademarks take precedent over
domain names? what is the future of copyright? of telecom regulation? and
what about personal privacy?

Mr. Kyer will look at both the challenges generated by e-commerce and the
efforts being made in Canada and elsewhere to meet these challenges in a
way that preserves and promotes societal values without discouraging
e-commerce initiatives.

The event starts at 2:30 in Davis Centre room 1302.

The volleyball Warriors will host Guelph's Gryphons tonight in
the Physical Activities Complex -- the women's game is at 6 p.m., the
men's at 8:00.

Volunteers are still wanted to help make the CUTC a success,
says one of the organizers, computer science student Doug Sibley.
"We need people Thursday morning as guides, for bussing, and for food,
and during the workshops to check nametags," he says. "Our largest shortage
is Friday morning." And so on. "This is an amazing opportunity to meet
and network with people from all across Canada." Anyone interested can
call 746-7945 or
check the web.

Tomorrow brings the start of a big event on campus, the second annual
Canadian Undergraduate Technology
Conference, with some big-name speakers from the high-tech
world. A pre-conference networking session runs this evening, along with
the opening of a "TechArt" display, open only to those who have registered
for the CUTC. Tomorrow morning's keynote talk, though, by UW president
David Johnston, is open to anyone interested (8:30 a.m. in the Humanities
Theatre, and webcast on the CUTC site). Several other major events in the
course of the three-day conference are also open to the public.

Tomorrow at 3:00, Larry Bourne, director of the University of Toronto
program in planning, will speak -- "will lend his charismatic and
entertaining voice", a publicity blurb says -- to the topic of
municipal government. It's the first of a series of talks being held
in UW's school of planning. Location: Environmental Studies I room 221. More
details in tomorrow's Bulletin.

Looking ahead, the band "Critical Mass", which includes a number of UW
people, will be performing Friday night at St. Jerome's University.
It's the band's first concert in Kitchener-Waterloo in some two years, and
certainly the first since it won the "best rock album" award in 2000
from the Canadian Gospel Music Association. Tickets for the concert are $5.

Renison College will hold its annual haircutting pub and alumni
reunion -- now there's a juxtaposition! -- on Friday, February 2.
It's a fund-raiser for HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre, and advance
tickets are $3. "Meet old friends," the flyer says, "make new ones, and
get a great haircut, all at the same time!"

And finally: no, today is not payday for faculty and monthly-paid staff,
although one calendar available on campus says so. Payday this month will
be the last Friday as usual -- day after tomorrow.